Notable Quotables - 07/10/1989

Published: 7/10/1989 12:00 AM ET

Oliver North

"He's one of the
biggest liars in American history."
- Tom Braden on Crossfire, July 5.

"What on earth
could Washington's inner-city youth have done to U.S. District Judge Gerhard
Gesell for him to impose a convicted felon on them as a role model?....Will we
see little North clones in brown shirts marching around the ghetto quoting
from Ollie's oracles of heroism and morality? Can't you envision North handing
out portable paper shredders to school kids?...If teachers complained, North's
covert kiddy crew could ransom grades for stolen hubcaps."
- Barbara Reynolds, "Inquiry" Editor of USA Today, July 7.

I.F. Stone

"The late I.F.
"Izzy" Stone was one of the all-time treasured Americans. The folk
hero of the New Left was arguably the best investigative journalist ever to
take finger to typewriter and he was a cultural spirit to millions, yours
truly most definitely included. We will never see his likes again."
- CNN and Mutual Broadcasting talk show host Larry King in USA Today,
June 26.

"In a way, I was
half a Jeffersonian and half a Marxist. I never saw a contradiction between
the two, and I still don't."
- I.F. Stone quoted in The Nation, July 10.

Political
Labeling I

"Kudos to CBS and
NBC as the only two broadcast-news organizations that have a policy to use the
journalistically objective terminology, prochoice and antiabortion."
- Boston Globe television reviewer Ed Siegel, July 4.

Political
Labeling II

"Conservative
Robert Bork said he thought this one would be adopted because of people's
strong feelings about the flag... Former Senator Birch Bayh is an expert on
constitutional amendments. Today he expressed concern that this amendment
could be used to score other political points."
- NBC's Carl Stern on the June 27 Nightly News.

Gross National
Product

"Economy expanding,
slightly stronger"
- Washington Times, June 23.

"GNP Figures
Indicate a Slowdown"
- Washington Post, same day.

Communism

"Communism got to
be a terrible word here in the United States, but our attitude toward it may
have been unfair. Communism got in with a bad crowd when it was young and
never had a fair chance...

The Communist ideas of
creating a society in which everyone does his best for the good of everyone is
appealing and fundamentally a more uplifting idea than capitalism. Communism's
only real weakness seems to be that it doesn't work."
- 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney in The New York Times,
June 26.

S & L Crisis

"Many of the
private owners of the thrifts who profited by reckless lending turned out to
be big contributors through their PAC's to leaders of Congress, who, in turn,
jawboned the thrift regulators into delaying a crackdown on the S&L
industry. The deregulation of S&L's that made these unwise lending
practices possible was instituted under the Republicans in 1982."
- Mortimer Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report,
July 3.

CBS Reading
Material

"I read Mother
Jones carefully and look forward to every issue. After all, stories that
started out in Mother Jones have wound up on 60 Minutes."
- CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace as quoted in
subscription letter for the far-left magazine.

Moral
Equivalency

"Four persons were
executed yesterday, three in Shanghai and one in Parchman, Miss. World opinion
has shouted its outrage at the barbarism of the Chinese government crackdown.
But in America, capital punishment is on the rise."
- Boston Globe columnist Robert Turner, June 23.

"Yet even as we
recoil at the slaughter in Beijing, the U.S. Congress is preparing to help
finance a similar assault on the innocents in a tiny fragment of Central
America known as El Salvador."
- Richard Goodwin, former Special Assistant to Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson, in the Los Angeles Times, June 12.

"Well in some sense
we would have to say that this is a new America and there is a new South in
part because we had our Tienanmen Square. People were being assassinated and
killed....We're fighting for on-site, same-day registration. We have less
participation, for example, than Nicaragua or than Panama."
- Jesse Jackson on Good Morning America, June 29.

Democratic Think
Tank

"The Center is
unique because it understands the necessary relationship between politics and
policy and is extremely helpful in sorting out the superficial from the
serious."
- CBS Political Editor Dotty Lynch on the liberal Center for National Policy.
From the Center's 1988 annual report.

Lyn Nofziger

"A setback for
prosecutors in a key test of the ethics in government law today. A federal
appeals court here in Washington overturned the ethics conviction of Lyn
Nofziger."
- Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, June 27.

Ethnic Unrest

"Appearing on a
nightly news program, Mr. Gorbachev warned that continued violence will
eventually tear the Soviet Union apart, and he hinted that those who stir up
unrest will not be tolerated."
- Rick Moore on CNN's PrimeNews, July 1.

"He [Gorbachev]
called for the freedom and equality of all the many different ethnic and
national groups within the Soviet Union, but he made no specific
proposals."
- Reporter Jonathan Sanders on the CBS Evening News, the same night.

PRC v. ROC

"Throughout the
ranks of Chinese-American organizations - ranging from those that long have
sympathized with the People's Republic to those that from the beginning have
supported the warlord regime on Taiwan - all are shocked. All are
outraged."
- Reporter Charles Radin in a June 16 Boston Globe story on
Chinese-American protesters. (Thanks to Don Feder of the Boston Herald.)

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